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When a designer starts to design the form of a new product, she needs to integrate many demands and wishes that the prospective users of the product may have. Not only technical and objective demands are important, but also aesthetic, emotional, and other experiential factors, some of which are hard or impossible to express objectively. In design practice, the designer has to balance between objective and subjective properties, between functional technology and emotional expressiveness, between information and inspiration. Design development by ‘Kansei (subjective criteria) science’or ‘Kansei engineering’is a new approach which originated in these conditions.

When a design approach uses Kansei engineering, we give our attention to the behaviors of people when they perceive images or objects including products, and study how their personal preferences or cultural bases work to their feelings.‘Pleasure’would be one of the major feelings from the impression occured by Kansei. However, when designing products, designers are not only concerned with the visual appearances but also the other properties of the product. Objects are not only looked at in isolation, but are seen in a context, are handled, touched, sometimes also heard or even tasted. Therefore it is important that a wider range of experience, a fuller integrated Kansei appreciation, is incorporated into the design approach. In this chapter, we introduce the basic ideas and the movement of figuring out the structure of Kansei in Japan, and how to apply Kansei to design approaches.